This document summarizes key concepts from works about new media literacies and participatory culture by Henry Jenkins. It discusses how participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement, requiring new social skills like collaboration, networking, and collective intelligence. These skills build on traditional literacies. The document also examines concepts like transmedia navigation, multimodality, appropriation, and how new approaches to reading and writing are emerging that focus on participation, motivation, and sharing meanings across media. It advocates for teaching these new media literacies in classrooms.

1. New Media Literacies: an
inspiration for new
approaches to the classroom
practices
Prof.ssa Ilaria Filograsso
25/10/2016

2. Henry Jenkins
www.newmedialiteracies.org
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3. A participatory culture is a
culture with relatively low
barriers to artistic expression
and civic engagement, strong
support for creating and sharing
one’s creations, and some type
of informal mentorship whereby
what is known by the most
experienced is passed along to
novices

4. A participatory culture is also one
in which members believe their
contributions matter, and feel
some degree of social connection
with one another (at the least
they care what other people think
about what they have created).

5. Forms of participatory culture
include:
• Affiliations = memberships, formal and informal, in
online communities centered around various forms of
media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message
boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).
• Expressions = producing new creative forms, such as
digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan
videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).
• Collaborative Problem-solving = working together in
teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and
develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia,
alternative reality gaming, spoiling).
• Circulations = Shaping the flow of media (such as
podcasting, blogging).

6. Why We Should Teach Media Literacy: Three
Core Problems
• The Participation Gap - the unequal access to the
opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that
will prepare youth for full participation in the world of
tomorrow.
• The Transparency Problem - The challenges young
people face in learning to see clearly the ways that
media shape perceptions of the world.
• The Ethics Challenge - The breakdown of traditional
forms of professional training and socialization that
might prepare young people for their increasingly
public roles as media makers and community
participants.

7. Participatory culture shifts the focus
of literacy from one of individual
expression to community involvement.
The new literacies almost all involve
social skills developed through
collaboration and networking.These
skills build on the foundation of
traditional literacy, research skills,
technical skills, and critical analysis
skills taught in the classroom.

8. • Participatory culture is emerging
as the culture absorbs and
responds to the explosion of new
media technologies that make it
possible for average consumers
to archive, annotate, appropriate,
and recirculate media content in
powerful new ways.

9. Rethinking literacy
Literacy is no longer read as a set of
personal skills; rather, the new media
literacies are a set of social skills and
cultural competencies, vitally
connected to our increasingly public
lives online and to the social networks
through which we operate.
Developing literacy is about learning
how to read, think, critique, and create
together

10. The new skills include
• Play: the capacity to experiment with
one’s surroundings as a form of
problem-solving
• Performance: the ability to adopt
alternative identities for the purpose of
improvisation and discovery
• Simulation: the ability to interpret and
construct dynamic models of real-world
processes
• Appropriation: the ability to
meaningfully sample and remix media
content

11. • Multitasking: the ability to scan one’s
environment and shift focus as needed
to salient details.
• Distributed Cognition: the ability to
interact meaningfully with tools that
expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence: the ability to
pool knowledge and compare notes
with others toward a common goal
• Judgment: the ability to evaluate the
reliability and credibility of different
information sources

12. • Transmedia Navigation: the ability to
follow the flow of stories and
information across multiple modalities
• Networking:the ability to search for,
synthesize, and disseminate
information
• Negotiation: the ability to travel across
diverse communities, discerning and
respecting multiple perspectives, and
grasping and following alternative
norms.

13. New media literacies include the
traditional literacy that evolved with
print culture as well as the newer
forms of literacy within mass and
digital media. Much writing about
twenty-first century literacies seems to
assume that communicating through
visual, digital, or audiovisualmedia will
displace reading and writing.We
fundamentally disagree. Before
students can engage with the new
participatory culture, they must be
able to read and write.

14. Participatory reading is a matter
not only of knowing how to
respond to a text creatively and
critically but also of knowing how
to create and circulate content.

15. What New Skills Matter? New Social
Skills and Cultural Competencies
• The social production of meaning is more than
individual interpretation multiplied; it represents a
qualitative difference in the ways we make sense of
cultural experience, and in that sense, it represents a
profound change in how we understand literacy. In
such a world, youth need skills for working within
social networks, for pooling knowledge within a
collective intelligence, for negotiating across cultural
differences that shape the governing assumptions in
different communities, and for reconciling conflicting
bits of data to form a coherent picture of the world
around them.

16. Instead of asking what effects,
positive or negative, the
emergence of digital technologies
has had on kids reading skills, we
ask: How can we draw on the
skills and mindsets young people
are developing in their use of
digital technologies in order to
enhance their engagement with
traditional texts?

17. Conceptual Shift
The key premise of this shift is that
reading is an umbrella term for a variety
of critical and creative practices. In a
traditional model of reading, the
emphasis is on reading to understand
authorial intent, and on writing to
demonstrate mastery. The participatory
model emphasizes that understanding
authorial intent requires a broader lens.

19. Traditional expectations of reading - Reading literature, at
least as understood for the last couple of centuries, has
traditionally involved certain expectations of a text:
･ It is linear. You start at the beginning and go to the end.
Books have a design that you can best appreciate by reading
in a given order.
･ It is continuous. Books have a unity and cumulative effect
that you would lose by jumping around.
･ It is complete. You must read it all to get the meaning.
･ It is deep. Your first reading gives you only surface
understanding. You must read and re-read, looking for
significant patterns of language and theme, before you can
say you understand the text.

20. A participatory model of reading
encourages students to identify
their own motives for engaging
with a text, and to use those
motives in collaboration with
others to build knowledge about
the work collectively.

21. Nothing motivates readers more
than the prospect of becoming
authors or performers of their
own new texts.

22. Appropriation
• Appropriation may be understood as a
process that involves both analysis and
commentary. Sampling intelligently from the
existing cultural reservoir requires a close
analysis of the existing structures and uses
of this material; remixing requires an
appreciation of emerging structures and
latent potential meanings. For beginning
creators, appropriation provides a
scaffolding, allowing them to focus on some
dimensions of cultural production and rely on
the existing materials to sustain others.

23. Appropriation enters education when learners are encouraged to
dissect, transform, sample, or remix existing cultural materials.
• The MIT Comparative Media Studies Program hosts a
workshop each year, asking students to work in teams to
think through what would be involved in transforming an
existing media property (a book, film, television series, or
comic book) into a video or computer game and then
preparing a “pitch” presentation for their game: beginning
with a pre-existing property allows students to get started
quickly and more or less on equal footing given that they
are able to build on a text they have in common as readers
rather than one created by an individual student author; the
process of identifying core proper- ties of the original work
teaches students important skills at narrative and formal
analysis while the development of an alternative version of
the story in another medium emphasize the creative
expansion of the original content.

24. Transmedia Navigation - the ability to deal with
the flow of stories and information across
multiple modalities
• In an era of convergence, consumers become hunters
and gatherers pulling together information from
multiple sources to form a new synthesis. Storytellers
exploit this potential for transmedia storytelling;
advertisers talk about branding as depending on
multiple touch points; networks seek to exploit their
intellectual properties across many different channels.
As they do so, we encounter the same information,
the same stories, the same characters and worlds
across multiple modes of representation.Transmedia
stories at the most basic level are stories told across
multiple media. At the present time, the most
significant stories tend to flow across multiple media
platforms.

25. Transmedia storytelling represents a
process where integral elements of a
fiction get dispersed systematically
across multiple delivery channels for
the purpose of creating a unified and
coordinated entertainment experience.
Ideally, each medium makes its own
unique contribution to the unfolding of
the story.

26. Multimodality
• G. Kress (2003) stresses that modern literacy requires
the ability to express ideas across a broad range of
different systems of representation and signification
(including words, spoken or written; image, still and
moving; musical...3D models...). Each medium has its
own affordances, its own systems of representation,
its own strategies for producing and organizing
knowledge. Participants in the new media landscape
learn to navigate these different and sometimes
conflicting modes of representation and to make
meaningful choices about the best ways to express
their ideas in each context.

27. • In short, new media literacies involve the ability to
think across media, whether understood at the level of
simple recognition (identifying the same content as it
is translated across different modes of
representation), or at the level of narrative logic
(understanding the connections between story
communicated through different media), or at the level
of rhetoric (learning to express an idea within a single
medium or across the media spectrum).Transmedia
navigation involves both processing new types of
stories and arguments that are emerging within a
convergence culture and expressing ideas in ways
that exploit the opportunities and affordances
represented by the new media landscape. In other
words, it involves the ability to both read and write
across all available modes of expression.

28. • Students learn about multimodality and
transmedia navigation when they take
time to focus on how stories change as
they move across different contexts of
production and reception, as they give
consideration to the affordances and
conventions of different media, and as
they learn to create using a range of
different media tools

29. Students in literature classes are
asked to take a familiar fairy tale,
myth, or legend and identify how this
story has been retold across different
media, different historical periods, and
different national contexts. Students
search for recurring elements as well
as signs of the changes that occur as
the story are retold in a new context.

30. We have to focus on
new ways of thinking about reading for school -
- that they will be encouraged to use the reading
styles they use outside of school for this. One really
important way to be engaged in required reading is
to figure out what motivates you to read for fun or
outside of class, and to try to find a way to use that
to motivate your reading for school. This doesn’t
mean the traditional aspects of reading disappear
they’re still valuable and useful to help drive our
understanding - but they can be used in
combination with other, different ways of engaging
with a book.

31. • Flows of reading is an online digital
book complementary to Reading in a
partecipatory culture (2013). Flows of
reading models a new type of reader -
one who reads across different media,
with reading undestood as an activity
of sharing, deconstructing, and making
meaning
http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/flowsofreadin
g/index

32. A community of readers in the classroom offerse a supportive
environment through which individual students might develop their
own expertise and share what they discover about the group and
themselves whith the group as a whole
• Mapping our identities as readers
• Expanding the learning ecology
• Mobilizing student expertise
• Stump the expert
• Reading across media
• Supporting creative responces
• Bringing popular culture to school

33. Four paths
1. Motives for reading urges
readers to reflect on their own
personal motives for approaching
a text and to allow themselves to
be moved by the flow of of others’
interpretations and media
creations

34. 2. Appropriation and Remixing
invites readers to apply creative
techniques of sampling or
combining media that build upon
the original texts and move the
flow in the direction of new
meaning

35. 3. Negotiating Cultural Spaces
suggests readers examine the
social context of unfamiliar texts
by reflecting on the flow of
different perspectives and
behaviors whithin subcultures

36. 4. Continuities and silences guides
readers to exlplore the
associations and absences whitin
texts in order to understand the
flow of meanings converge and
get left behind for others to
discover

37. References
• H. Jenkins, Confronting the
Challenges of Partecipatory Culture,
MacArthur Foundation, MIT PRESS,
2009
• H. Jenkins, Wyn Kelley, Reading in a
partecipatory culture, Teachers
College Press, 2013
• G. Kress, Literacy in the new media
age, Routledge, 2003